I am trying to RDP from a Windows 7 Professional dual monitor physical machine to a Windows 7 Professional VM hosted on esxi 4.0.

I can get the spanning option to work to both monitors, but I have tried 3 different methods of connecting but have not been able to use true multiple monitors.

At different times, I tried checking the "use all monitors" option, command line mstsc /multimon and added the line use multimon:i:1 to the .rdp file. None of these worked. Any ideas? The physical machine can connect to other Windows 7 physical machines with true multi monitor access.

I also have the same issue when going from a 32bit RC1 machine to a Windows 7 Professional x64, but not when going in the reverse direction. Here's the .rdp:

I believe Oscar Duveborn answered this question in a posting on another question: You need Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise at the end-point to support multiple terminal services displays (or any edition of Windows Server 2008 R2). Can anyone confirm there is no way to install/upgrade rdp7.0 on professional to get true dual screen rather than spanning?

I thought the correct flag was mstsc /span? Anyway you might have better luck with this over at superuser.com
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Mark Henderson♦Jan 25 '10 at 2:04

I suspect the problem may be more with the ESX virtual machine's fairly limited virtual video adapter - I believe true multi-monitor support is available with VMware View managed VM's when using PCOIP rather than RDP. Have you tried this with Workstation 7 or the new version of Player?
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HelvickJan 25 '10 at 2:19

Hmm. We run our Terminal Servers on ESXi, and the console settings are always just set to 640x480 with the VMWare tools installed. When you run an mstsc session the local video driver is bypassed with the Terminal Server renderer. In fact I've had a TS that doesn't even have the local video card driver installed and it's fine with multi-desktop...
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Mark Henderson♦Jan 25 '10 at 5:55